


All These Stars, Are They Aligning Now?

by sealavenderinajamjar



Category: The 100 (TV), The 100 Series - Kass Morgan
Genre: F/M, an au with a twist, basically if attachments and love rosie had a a baby in a police station, bellarke modern au, cuz that's all i know how to write, pen pals but not, some creative liberties may be taken with police procedure, wow i'm bad at tagging
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-07-23
Updated: 2015-09-01
Packaged: 2018-04-10 20:01:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4405562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sealavenderinajamjar/pseuds/sealavenderinajamjar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clarke takes a job working the night-shift as a receptionist at a police station in a sketchy part of town, but ends  up getting more than she bargained for when she begins trading notes with the day-shift guy. Now who could that possibly be? (jk, we all know who it is)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. A Girl's Gotta Eat

**Author's Note:**

> A lil bit inspired by Attachments by Rainbow Rowell, but mostly inspired by my workplace where writing notes on various surfaces to each other is a daily part of life. Title taken from the great song ‘The Letter’ by Midnight Youth (a now defunct Kiwi band).

On several occasions, Clarke Griffin had often asked herself why the hell she was doing this. She could have just gotten a normal coffee shop job, like Wells had when he was doing his political science undergrad. She could have been like Raven, who had actually gotten a job in the field she was studying- as she had smugly pointed out when she got a call back from the auto shop. Or (god forbid) she could have even have sucked up to her mom and begged for access to her trust fund early- what was twenty-three to twenty-five anyway? But no. She had to take a job working the night shift as a receptionist (seven till three) at a precinct in the most dangerous part of town, five days a week. All so she could pay the stupid rent on the stupid apartment that she shared with her stupid best friends. 

Trying to ignore the graffiti scrawled across the blue and white sign labelling it ARK DISTRICT POLICE STATION, Clarke pushed her way through the double doors and nearly ran into a policeman holding a steaming cup of coffee. 

“Sorry!” she said, rearing back and tottering on her heels. “Didn’t see you there!”

“It’s alright!” The skinny Asian officer grabbed onto her elbow to prevent her from falling over. “Are you the new Roma?”

“The new what now?” Clarke said, confused. 

“Sorry, the new receptionist! Filing, organising-y person. Roma was our last one.” He leaned towards her conspiratorially. “She got fired.”

Clarke laughed nervously, then looked around her. The foyer of the precinct was dingy and dark, with stained carpet, a waiting area with a few bedraggled chairs, and a lone caged window set into the wall, through which Clarke could see a hive of activity going on.

“Come on, I’ll show you your desk,” the officer carried on cheerfully, ushering her through a bolted door next to the window. “I’m Officer Green, by the way”

“Clarke,” she replied, shaking his outstretched hand.

The station was crawling with people, moving from desk to desk, comparing reports, some disappearing through another mysterious door which Clarke suspected might house the holding cells.

Officer Green pointed her towards a desk to her immediate right, situated right in front of the window. It was a mess, cluttered with notes and papers and stationery with an ancient old computer balanced precariously on top.

“Okay, looks like the day clerk has run off, but I’ll go get our admin guy and he’ll set you up” He gave her a toothy smile and walked off, yelling “STERLING!” as he went.

Clarke watched him go, then, resigning herself to waiting, she went to her new desk and sat down, placing her bag on the ground next to her. Carefully, she started to sort through the debris on her new desk, placing to the side anything that looked like it could be important and tossing anything that wasn’t. Apparently her new desk mate was fond of half-finishing notes before getting distracted, so she amused herself by reading through a few, trying to decipher the loopy handwriting.

_“This week:_  
Buy food for Sunday night dinner  
Email Sinclair about new proposal  
Ask about potential extra hours at Dropship? Or not?  
Remember that L is…” 

But what ‘L ‘was never seemed to get resolved- and so the pattern continued. So she kept sorting, finding a weird sort of meditation in the menial work. Finally getting to the pile closest to the keyboard, Clarke found a full note, complete on a ripped out piece of composition paper. And apparently, it was addressed to her.

_“Dear New Roma,_  
Welcome to the graveyard shift- it’s hell on Earth. A few tips: the F4 extension doesn’t work, you have to press F45 instead, don’t drink the coffee unless you know Detective Indra made it, and if someone points a gun at you, duck and cover to avoid being shot in the face.  
Have fun!  
B” 

Well, that was promising. Clarke pulled a face at the paper, before finally hearing her name being called from across the room. A frazzled looking administrator strode over to her and started talking, and her training finally began.

*

By ten o’clock, Clarke was more than ready for a break. So far, the past three hours had involved a lot of taking calls and sorting through emails, but thankfully very little face to face confrontation- yet. The coffee was terrible, as her desk mate had advised, but at this point in the night Clarke was just grateful for anything hot and caffeinated.

Returning to her desk, she sat down on her squeaky swivel chair and swayed idly. Sterling had explained to her that her job would mainly be comprised of “making connections” i.e. the douchebags way of saying she was mainly needed for forwarding calls and alerting officers to people looking for them.

“We used to have officers doing this,” Sterling had said half-apologetically as he talked her through the rudimental functions of the public email management system. “But we’re so understaffed at the moment Captain Kane decided that civilians could be trusted with front office stuff. Good for public image, you know?”

Plus you can pay desperate students ridiculously low wages, Clarke thought wryly to herself. 

As she flipped idly through a file on the desk labelled “Emergency Security Measures”, her eye was drawn to a book that looked particularly out of place lined up with the stark office manuals against the corkboard. Mythology and More! proclaimed the title of the book, with a goofy looking nineties-era cartoon of Zeus, Poseidon and Hades on the cover. Clarke flipped it open to the first page, spotting a dedication in cramped handwriting.

_“For my favourite little warrior, Love Mom x”_

Clarke smiled, then began to look through the book. During her four years of private school education, she had been required to take Latin, and so was quite familiar with many of the tales, but she hadn’t read any of the stories in years. She came across one of her favourite tales, the one with Artemis and the stags, but before she could really get into it, the phone rang.

*

The rest of the night dragged on (apparently Tuesdays weren’t a hotbed for crime- who knew?), so Clarke amused herself by flipping through her bio notes, watching the officers, and sketching- passing faces, the wide expanse of the room, and then, after a beat, Artemis, her face fierce, eyes blazing, as she looked down on the cowering figure of Actaeon.  
By the time Wells texted that he was here, Clarke was definitely on the verge of falling asleep. The precinct had been dead for the past few hours, with only a few detectives wearily going through paperwork, heads lolling and limbs stretched out on any available surface.

As she picked up her bag and grabbed her jacket, she glanced down at her nearly finished drawing and had an idea. Grabbing the nearest pen, she quickly scribbled a few words on the corner of the drawing, then, satisfied, she propped it up so that it would be the first thing her new co-worker would see when they came in in the morning. 

Swiping her card to let herself out into the foyer, she saw a waiting Wells, sloppily dressed in sweatpants and a faded Harvard t-shirt underneath his favourite flak jacket.

“You didn’t have to come pick me up,” Clarke admonished him, hiding a yawn with her hand. “I’m perfectly capable of walking to the subway myself.”

“I wasn’t sleeping, and until Raven fixes your junkbox of a car, that is exactly what I am doing. Your mother would kill me if you got murdered under my watch.” Wells smiled tiredly, twirling his car keys in his hands. “Shall we?”

“Yeah, let’s get out of here,” Clarke said, shouldering her bag and pushing open the doors, revelling in the night air over her flushed face.

_Dear B,_  
Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.  
See you around,  
C 


	2. What Friends Are For

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clarke has a new pen pal, and her new job seems to be a cake-walk- or is it?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have taken so long to update this, but I've been in a bit of a slump and I've finally got my groove back, so hopefully this will make up for it!

Over the next few weeks, Clarke settled into her new routine. Her mornings and afternoons were usually cram-packed, full of classes and studying and the occasional uncomfortable lunches with her mother, but usually the much more companionable ones with Raven and Wells. Occasionally Finn showed up too, although Clarke usually made up an excuse to leave early when that happened. It was still awkward between the two of them, and although Raven seemed to be fine with her ex, Clarke was still not really over the whole ‘you-cheated-on-your-longtime-girlfriend-with-me-and-made-me-feel-like-crap’ situation that Finn had left her in two years ago, when Raven had moved to the city to attend the same college as him. 

Thankfully, Raven had mostly bypassed the murderous rage that Clarke had expected, and they had become firm friends, much to Finn’s horror. They even shared an apartment with Wells- Clarke’s childhood best friend- now, and Clarke was constantly having to wind her way around Raven’s dubious looking experiments, and teetering piles of heavy law textbooks -curtesy of Wells- just in order to reach the cereal box in the morning.

With all the craziness going on in the rest of her life, Clarke actually found her job peaceful in comparison. At the station, everything was simpler, problems were easier, and Clarke was even perfecting the ‘bearer of bad news’ face, which was practically a requirement of the job, whether it was through dealing with grouchy officers or with irate family members waiting to bail their various relatives out. Clarke had only been really, truly scared twice, when a man with red-rimmed eyes and liquor on his breath had kept throwing himself at the window, demanding to see an officer and had had to be restrained physically by Jordan and Green, and when she had nearly been bottled on her way out of the station, glass flying by her face in shards as a roaring car sped by, the sounds of hooting and hollering following in its wake. 

But aside from the various scary perps, or the inevitable mess the station became every Friday night when the people from the booze bus were paraded through the station, Clarke enjoyed the job. The quiet of the latest hours, the familiar hum of the fluorescent lights over her head, the jokes thrown around by the bored officers. They debated in loud voices- who had worked the most cases, who had had the weirdest request from the public, who was secretly dating who, Clarke occasionally being brought in to play peacekeeper or to decide a tie. And then, there were the notes.

Her first day had set a kind of precedent, and one of the best parts of her shift was coming in and seeing what had been left for her that day. She had never met the elusive B, as he (yes she had established that at least) always managed to have disappeared by the time she got to the station, but she could certainly feel his presence whenever she sat down for the night, in the stained coffee mug that he never put away, the mess of files and lists, and of course, the notes. They had had a bit of back and forth each week, with Clarke usually leaving him a drawing, and after that first night, he left her snippets of poetry. Yes, poetry. And not just any old poetry. Epic poetry. What a nerd.

Through these notes, Clarke had gleaned a fair bit of information- B actually stood for Bellamy, which had prompted Clarke to leave a printout of various flowery meanings of the name, as well as an open YouTube link to the entire score of Beauty and the Beast. He had retaliated by throwing Arthur C. Clarke quotes at her for the rest of the week- which was possibly the lamest form of payback Clarke had ever experienced.

_“I'm sure the universe is full of intelligent life. It's just been too intelligent to come here.”- B_

_Oh my god, are you literally just going through the Goodreads for this?- C_

She also found out, subtly, that he was taking night classes in history and classics at the U, that he was a bartender before he worked at the station and that he hated Captain Kane and his minions. He was also a stickler for details, and whenever she got particularly creative with a myth (which were gradually becoming her favourite thing to draw) he got nit-picky, pointing out inaccuracies in red pen like a teacher marking an assessment. Like she didn’t put up with that enough on a day-to-day basis.

Despite all this, it was kind of fun. The anonymity meant she didn’t feel the need to put on a veneer of professionalism like she did around the rest of her co-workers, and it was exciting, like having a pen pal. A really, really nerdy pen pal, who criticised her art.

*

Despite Wells’ concerns and Raven’s warnings, Clarke had never really seen what was so dangerous about being a receptionist at Ark. Sure, the people were tough, but Clarke was used to dealing with thugs during her volunteer days down at the rec centre, so she figured that she could employ the same method here- take-no-shit, brisk and to the point.   
And so far it had been working for her. In hindsight, that was probably incredibly naïve.

This particular Thursday night was a busy one- there had been a drive by shooting a few blocks over. Miller and Lincoln were up to their eyeballs in taking witness statements and processing the few stragglers that had been caught around the scene, including a really nasty piece of work called John Mbege, who kept pulling at his handcuffs and yelling obscenities at anyone who would listen.

“He’s been on our radar for a while,” Lincoln explained to Clarke, who had wandered over during her break while she was waiting for her coffee to brew. “Petty stuff mostly, but it looks like he’s gotten mixed up in some gang activity now, so it’s probably best we have him here.”

Lincoln was one of her favourite officers, she had decided earlier that week. Even though she had only been there for a couple of months, he never made her feel unwelcome, which was more than she could say for some of the other officers. And he was always nice about her art. She had spotted a corner of a tribal tattoo poking out from under his pressed sleeve a few times, so she figured he must be at least a little into design too.

“So what will you do with him now?” Clarke asked, watching the tall man wriggle in a chair in front of the intimidating gaze of Lincoln’s partner, Nyko.

“Leave him to stew in holding for a while, then Detective Indra wants to take a run at him, see if he can lead her to any of the big fish in the Skaikru”. Lincoln shrugged, picking up a sheaf of paperwork and shuffling it into order on his desk. “Personally I think he’s too low level, but you try telling Indra that.”

“No thanks,” Clarke shuddered. “Anyway, my fifteen’s nearly up. I’ll send Mbege’s next of kin through if they show up.”

“Thanks,” Lincoln said, clapping her on the shoulder and heading over to join Nyko.

Clarke ambled back over to the desk and leaned over to flip the ‘Open for enquiries’ sign back around. The lobby was only half-full at the moment, with a few mothers and girlfriends waiting, a small child running around banging his toy trucks together, and a guy propped up in the corner with a hoodie covering his head. As soon as he spotted Clarke he strode over, body posture aggressive.

“I want to see John Mbege,” he said softly, unnervingly. Clarke shrunk back slightly, then steeled herself and met his eyes steadily.

“Are you family?” she asked, keeping her tone even. 

The guy bristled at her words and a grimace spread across his face. “We don’t have family here, princess,” he said, still in the same unnerving tone. “We have blood. Now can I see Mbege or not?”

“Unless you’re here to bail him out, it’s only next of kin,” Clarke said. She was trying to be firm, but this guy was seriously freaking her out.

The man sighed, then lowered his hood, revealing an unhealthy pallor and matted brown hair.

“Well,” he said, a note of sarcasm creeping into his voice. “You can’t say I didn’t ask nicely.”

His hand flashed to the waistband of his pants and the next thing Clarke saw was the shiny metal of a gun, pointing shakily at her face. Shrieks from the women around him could be heard, as he gave Clarke a saccharine smile before swinging the gun around, aiming it lazily at different people before turning back to Clarke.

“Send out Mbege,” he said. “And maybe, maybe I won’t shoot any of these nice mommies.”

Clarke opened her mouth, but nothing came out. The appearance of the gun was so inherent in its wrongness- she couldn’t process anything.

“Now princess,” the man said again, his hands shaking slightly. “Do I have to ask again?”

Her throat had closed over- she couldn’t even say anything in response to his question. His smile quickly turned into an ugly scowl.

“Bitch,” he said, almost pleasantly. “I’m going to count to three, and if that door’s not open by the time I’m done, then I’m going to put a bullet straight through your skull.”

Clarke’s brain had finally switched on, and she groped a hand along her desk, trying to find the silent emergency alarm that sat on the far side without looking down.

“One,” the man said, adjusting his position to aim the gun at her forehead. Clarke let out a squeak of terror, but kept searching, nearly gasping in relief when she found the small red button and pushed. “Two,” he carried on, flicking the safety off and squaring his shoulders. Clarke braced herself, ready to follow procedure. “Princess, stop playing with me and open the damn door…”

“Drop your weapon!” Lincoln’s voice boomed across the precinct, as he, Indra and Miller sprang up on either side of Clarke, while Nyko, who had snuck up behind her, tugged her sharply down just as a bullet ricocheted off the back of Officer Green’s desk chair. 

“Murphy, put your gun down right now, or you’ll be losing more than your freedom tonight,” Indra said, her voice steady and assured. “If you’re lucky we might even let you and Mbege have adjoining cells.”

Clarke heard the clatter of a gun falling to the ground, and she let out a breath she hadn’t even known she’d been holding. The other police officers surged through the door to secure Murphy, but Nyko stayed down on the ground with her.

“Are you alright?” he asked, squeezing her arms as he pulled her up and began checking her for injuries.

“I think so,” Clarke said, ashamed at how pitiful her voice sounded. “I just _stood_ there Nyko, I just let him threaten all those people and I couldn’t move, I couldn’t breathe…” She could feel the hysteria bubbling up in her chest, and she took a few more gasping breaths, trying to swallow it down. “I felt so powerless, and I hated it.”

Nyko took her hand and pulled her up so she could sit in her chair. Out of the corner of her eye she could see Lincoln leading Murphy away, through to the back entrance, followed closely by Anya and Indra. 

“Clarke, you did everything right,” Nyko said, patting her shoulder semi-awkwardly. “You followed procedure, and no one got shot. I’d consider that a win any day.” Clarke smiled weakly at that. “Now I think you’ve earned the right to go home early- I’ll square it with Kane. There shouldn’t be too much more for you to do tonight anyway.”

“Thank you Nyko,” Clarke said, grateful for the chance to go home and sleep off this awful experience. 

“I’ll go check on Mbege, you finish up here,” He smiled, reassuring, at her, and then walked off, leaving Clarke alone at her desk, watching the scared citizen’s mill about the waiting room, still panicked. She took a last deep breath, and then set about gathering up her things. Just as she was about to sweep her planner into her handbag, she remembered she hadn’t left Bellamy a note.

It seemed silly, but then she thought of his advice on that first day, and she couldn’t not leave anything.

_So, I forgot to duck when someone pointed a gun at me, but I did get tackled down, does that count? No art tonight sorry, nearly getting shot seems to sap all my creative energy for some unknown reason. Anyway, sorry about the mess (I’m not really, but it seems polite to say so).  
-C_

She gathered the rest of her belongings, propped the note up as normal, and then headed out the door, yelling goodbye to her colleagues as she swiped out.

*

The next day, after many protests from her friends that she should just quit on the spot and go find a job at a Wal-Mart instead, she headed in as normal, on higher alert than she would usually be.

The precinct was more sombre than she was used to, and she noticed a few cops were giving her sympathetic looks. Trying to ignore this, she headed to her desk and sat down, placing her bag at her feet.

“What have you got for me this time?” she wondered aloud as she reached for the scrappy bit of notebook paper lying on top of the keyboard.

_C,  
Okay, here’s what you do._

_1) Call up Grounders Fitness, and ask about their self-defence courses_  
2) Ask about ANYTHING that is being taken by Lexa Woods  
3) Mention that you come care of Bellamy  
4) Learn how to kick ass 

_Seriously C, this shit is important. I’m not losing my personal art nerd over someone as stupid as Murphy.-B_  
P.S. I left a surprise present in the coffee mug today  
P.P.S. Its gum 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So there you go, and on a (sort of) cliffhanger too! Sorry Murphy fans, but he does make an excellent bad guy. Also this is going to be slowburn, so if you're not in it for the long haul, I'm sorry. As always, I love comments, and you can always come find me on [tumblr](http://princess-blakes.tumblr.com) if you want to cry about Bellarke!

**Author's Note:**

> So any thoughts? Opinions? Can ya guess who B is? I just got the idea for this fic stuck in my head and just couldn't get it out. I've got most of the second chapter sketched out, and I'm hoping it'll be about six/ seven chapters.  
> Come cry with me about Bellarke on [tumblr?](http://princess-blakes.tumblr.com)


End file.
